Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare is accelerating its push into outpatient care, building on years of aggressive urgent care expansion and a growing slate of freestanding emergency departments as care continues to shift toward lower-cost, more convenient settings.
In early February, HCA announced two Texas acquisitions that expand its urgent care and freestanding emergency department footprint, underscoring how acquisitions remain central to its outpatient growth strategy.
Dallas-based Medical City Healthcare, a HCA subsidiary, acquired 13 CommunityMed urgent care centers that will operate under the CareNow Urgent Care brand. The deal expands CareNow’s Texas presence to more than 95 sites and brings HCA’s urgent care footprint to more than 340 locations across the country.
The acquired urgent care centers are in Arlington, Bartonville, Crossroads, Haslet, Heath, Mansfield, Melissa, Midlothian, Princeton, Prosper and Wichita Falls, Texas, marking a new market for Medical City Healthcare. Employees in good standing at the centers transitioned to Medical City Healthcare as part of the deal.
Separately, Austin, Texas-based St. David’s HealthCare — another HCA subsidiary — acquired six freestanding emergency centers, bringing its Central Texas freestanding ED footprint to 13. The facilities were purchased from ZT Corporate, which operated them under its Altus Community Healthcare portfolio.
The newly acquired locations include St. David’s Emergency Center-Anderson Mill, Arboretum, East Riverside, Mueller and South Lamar in Austin, as well as St. David’s Emergency Center-Wells Branch in Pflugerville, Texas. The centers are now clinically integrated with and under the leadership of certain St. David’s HealthCare hospitals.
Financial terms of the transactions were not disclosed.
“As our population grows, local emergency rooms continue to see high patient volumes,” David Huffstutler, president and CEO of St. David’s HealthCare, said in the release. “These acquisitions are strategically designed to ease pressure on large medical centers and expand access to high-quality emergency care closer to home for Central Texans.”
Urgent care as a long-term growth engine
The latest deals build on a multiyear push by HCA to scale urgent care as a gateway into its broader healthcare network. Gaps in primary care access, high emergency room costs and increased investment by health systems and private equity firms have fueled rapid growth in the urgent care market.
Health systems increasingly view urgent care centers as both a competitive shield and a funnel for downstream specialty and inpatient services, a strategy HCA has embraced across multiple regions.
HCA now operates about 2,400 outpatient sites — including hundreds of urgent care facilities — and 190 hospitals across 20 states, according to its website. Texas has been a focal point of that strategy, accounting for dozens of HCA hospitals and urgent care centers.
HCA has also pursued urgent care growth beyond Texas.
In 2022, the for-profit system acquired MD Now Urgent Care, a 59-site network in Florida and the state’s largest urgent care chain. Later that year, HCA expanded into Virginia with the acquisition of BetterMed, a 12-location urgent care group.
“The addition of MD Now Urgent Care in Florida enhances our already strong capabilities in a rapidly growing state by providing convenient outpatient care options for our patients,” HCA CEO Sam Hazen said at the time. “It also connects MD Now patients to a comprehensive statewide network of care, including acute care and specialty services should they be needed.”
Outpatient growth reshapes the network
HCA’s urgent care and freestanding ED expansion dovetails with a broader outpatient growth strategy outlined during the company’s Jan. 27 earnings call. The system added about 100 outpatient facilities in 2025 and is entering 2026 and 2027 with “significant capital in the pipeline” for outpatient development, Mr. Hazen said.
HCA operates is pushing toward a goal of between 18 and 20 outpatient sites per hospital by the end of the decade. Growth will come through a mix of new development and acquisitions, with HCA seeing more outpatient acquisition opportunities than in recent years.
That expansion is also reshaping HCA’s revenue mix. Mr. Hazen said outpatient revenue as a percentage of total revenue increased year over year in the fourth quarter, driven in part by outpatient growth outpacing inpatient hospital expansion.
“The combination of that is important to our overall network resiliency,” he said. “By that we mean creating an environment where patients have easier access into the HCA Healthcare system, and our payers actually have better price points for their members, such that they can get into the system with urgent care or a physician clinic or an ambulatory surgery center in a manner that is most productive for them as a patient.”
The outpatient push comes as HCA continues to post strong financial results. The system reported net income of $6.8 billion in 2025, up 17.8% year over year, and is projecting net income between $6.5 billion and $7 billion in 2026.
Together, HCA’s latest Texas acquisitions and its longer-term urgent care strategy highlight how outpatient care has become a cornerstone of the system’s growth, access and financial resilience.
The post HCA’s outpatient boom reshapes its care network appeared first on Becker's Hospital Review | Healthcare News & Analysis.
Source: Read Original Article
